In which huge things happen off the radar, and may have a large impact on voting rights of African Americans and Latinos in the upcoming presidential election.

In a federal courtroom down in the newly insane state of North Carolina, there is a story that practically everyone is missing due to their concentration on important national issues like whatever bilge oozed from the Trumpian piehole in the last half-hour. The country's most rigid and unbending new voter-suppression law is being taken to court.

After the high court's ruling, North Carolina passed laws that included tightening photo identification requirements and restricting early voting and same-day registration. Another provision eliminated a program that allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to preregister so they would be automatically registered to vote at 18. Other states also have recently revamped their election laws. Texas enacted a tough photo identification law that is being But the North Carolina laws are considered the broadest because they modify measures that had been adopted over the previous 15 years expressly to bolster electoral participation by minority and younger voters. The plaintiffs believe the trial "will have a lasting and decisive impact on the voting rights of African Americans and Latinos in North Carolina, and an impact on the Voting Rights Act itself," Penda Hair, a lawyer representing the NAACP, said in court, according to the Associated Press. "That is why they say about this case: 'This is our Selma...'"

To make that argument, those challenging North Carolina's law point to the timing of when it was introduced and passed: as soon as the Supreme Court struck down key protections in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Before that 2013 ruling, North Carolina and other states with a history of racial voter support had to clear any changes to their voting laws with the federal Justice Department. Free from that requirement, the Republican-controlled legislature pushed the bill through, and all provisions except the voter ID requirement went into effect for the 2014 midterm election. At the trial, attorneys will present reams of evidence that thousands of people were disenfranchised or faced unreasonable burdens in that election because of the new laws.

Nonsense, say the attorneys for the newly insane state of North Carolina.

But Tom Farr, a private attorney representing North Carolina, told the court that many of the restrictions exist in other states as well. "What is the dastardly thing that North Carolina has done that has been equated to the events in Selma?" Farr asked, according to the AP.

When blacks managed to qualify for the vote even under these measures, registrars would use their discretion to deny them the vote anyway. Alabama's constitution of 1901 was explicitly designed to disenfranchise blacks by such restrictive and fraudulent means. Despite this, Jackson Giles, a black janitor, qualified for the vote under Alabama's constitution. He brought suit against Alabama on behalf of himself and 75,000 similarly qualified blacks who had been arbitrarily denied the right to register. The Supreme Court rejected his claim in Giles v. Harris, 189 U.S. 475 (1903). In the most disingenuous reasoning since Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896) (rejecting a challenge to state-mandated racial segregation of railroad cars, on the ground that blacks' claims that segregation was intended to relegate them to inferior status was a figment of their imaginations), Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put Giles in a catch-22: if the Alabama constitution did indeed violate the 15th Amendment guarantee against racial discrimination in voting, then it is void and Giles cannot be legally registered to vote under it. But if it did not, then Giles' rights were not violated.

Whew. Good thing the Day of Jubilee has dawned. No, wait...

One of them was 94-year-old native North Carolinian Rosanell Eaton, who could not get a government issued voter ID. Her daughter, Armenta Eaton, told reporters that they made nine trips to the DMV, totaling more than 250 miles of driving, to acquire the proper papers."After seven decades of being able to vote in every county and state election, her ability is threatened now by this law," she said. "My mother was not born in a hospital, but by a midwife at her home. All her life she thought her name was one word, but the government document had it as two words. They also had a different date of birth, so they kept rejecting her for a state ID because of these discrepancies. Both she and I believe she should not have to have gone through these difficult times to exercise her right to vote as a citizen of these United States."

Of course, the ultimate argument from logic against these laws is that their stated purpose is to stop voter fraud that, from all available evidence, doesn't really exist. It is the unstated purposes, always, that do the real damage. No story concerning the 2016 election is more important than this one.

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